The Myth of The Money-Motivated Sales Pro

In his book Drive, as in the 10-minute must see-video in my last post, author Dan Pink doesn't address the time-honored doctrine of the money-motivated sales hero.

That doctrine goes thus: Sure, maybe the rest of us would prefer to work for its own sake as long as it's stimulating and we're paying the bills, but what about sales heroes, those rain-makers whose very success is gaged solely by the size of their paycheck, the car they drive, the price of their suits; the lavish vacations their company rewards them with?

I myself have held firmly to this relic of 20th-Century motivation. But I've hoped for someone to show me a better way than my antiquated notion of "The sales-pro exception." So I emailed Dan for clarity.

Dan delivered, and now I'm an even bigger fan.

First, read this column from the Sunday Telegraph.

Follow it up with "some research coming out challenging other orthodoxies. Here, for instance, is some work just out of Stanford."

Quite humbly, Dan finished his reply with this:

"So there's no universal answer, but part of me suspects that salespeople aren't all that different from the rest of us."

Dan Pink's phenomenal work is a key component of how business will be done better in this exciting new century. Read it. Watch it. Absorb it. Most importantly, act on it!

10 Very Important Minutes of Your Life

Watch this 10-minute video clip with audio from Daniel Pink, author of Drive. I'm going to watch it every Monday until I've got it memorized.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=player_embedded

I'd love to hear what you think.

How to Transform Work Culture (part 1)

As we discussed on my last post, a lot of business leaders are intimidated by the very topic of corporate culture. Culture is "squishy;" it smacks of Kumbaya. It's hard (if not impossible) to measure, completely impossible to chart on a graph and slip into a powerpoint for the board. That's scary!

Relax. No one's going to ask you to hold hands and sing around a campfire. Culture isn't nearly as mysterious or frightening as all that.

Culture is nothing more than widely-shared outlook backed up by widely-shared habits.

See? That's something you can sink your teeth into, isn't it? If you're still a little foggy, try these two phrases on for size:

"This is how we do things around here." and "That's not how we do things around here." (or "...on this team" or "...in this family" or "...in this platoon" or "...in this sorority." You get the picture.)

Look around your company. How are things done? What attitudes are common? What actions are routine? That's your culture, for better or for worse.

How is culture developed and shared with newcomers and reinforced among long-time members? Think of your own family. Rules are great and all, but is that what your family is really about? "Don't do this, don't do that?" Of course not. The way we indoctrinate new members (children) into our family is through the sharing of stories. Stories illustrate. Stories explain. Stories stay with us.

I can tell you every detail of a hundred Coine family stories by heart. Why? Because they're about people I love. ...Because they're a part of me. ...And especially because I've heard them a thousand times!

Now think of the culture shift you'd like to lead at your company. What values and habits do you want to instill or strengthen? Start celebrating these. Let the leaders share these stories with everyone across the organization. Let them start to publicly recognize, praise; maybe even reward those employees who are doing what's right. Let the other leaders farther down the organizational pyramid share and praise these same stories. And watch as new, maybe even better tales bubble up from the bottom to become your company's newest culture-building stories.

And now, time for an example. (I've got hundreds.)

If you're reading this blog from beyond the United States, you may never have heard of a department store chain called Nordstrom. If you haven't, suffice it to say that Nordstrom has built its five-star reputation on the often seemingly-ridiculous lengths its employees ("Nordies") will go to please their customers. They call these acts of unusual service "Heroics," and Nordies even enjoy an internal newsletter where they can read examples of some of the many heroics their friends and colleagues are pulling off each month around the country.

One such heroic begins with a very ordinary act, of a Nordie cheerfully wrapping a customer's gift one afternoon. "Hardly heroic" you think? I did, too. Until I learned that this was a customer of cross-mall rival Macy's, not of Nordstrom at all. It turns out Macy's wasn't able (or willing?) to wrap this customer's present for a birthday party, and the party was fast approaching. So, in a panic, the Macy's customer rushed down to Nordstrom, where she knew they were always ready to wrap a gift.

Stop right there. I don't know if that Macy's customer defected and is now a strictly-loyal Nordstrom customer or not. I wish I knew, but that's not the point. The important thing Nordstrom leadership wants all Nordies to take away from this story is that unbegrudgingly cheerful and amazingly helpful behavior is part of the very essence of Nordstrom. It's what Nordies do, and that's all.

Now I ask you: what stories do you share amongst your members and with your customers to show to each other and the world how you behave? And how does your leadership recognize and reward your heroics?

How do you transform an ordinary culture into one of immense profitability? One heroic story at a time.

Are you a Top 1% Leader?

You're a business leader and you want more profits. You've come to the right place.

You may have noticed my equation for just this situation, which I'm not shy about sharing on this blog, on Twitter, in my speeches, in my books, and really anyplace you find me. I call it the Three Legs Principle. In part, it goes like this:

LEADERSHIP + _______________ + _______________ = PROFITS

Take a look at that for a moment. What you'll notice is, there's this huge void between savvy Leadership and the Profits that leadership is aiming for.

In other words, no matter how sharp a leader you are, you can't get where you need to go without active buy-in and participation from your people.

The two missing pieces of the equation are CULTURE and CUSTOMER SERVICE. And the equation is in the order I present it for a very good reason. The Leadership has to come first - you, the top guy or gal, needs to get it or the whole show's over before it starts.

...Which explains most businesses. Clueless leaders abound, leaders who don't get that profits are the direct result of top-flight customer service. Most of the few who do get the customer service driver of profits don't value what is really driving the service, which is culture. And because these leaders don't understand culture, and so don't hold it in very high esteem, even these customer-service obsessed leaders don't see the point of throwing their effort into their company's culture.

Fortunately, there's one last cohort of leaders, the rarest of the rare, who have the vision it takes to bring greatness to their organization. They get it; they understand that Culture is where their energies have to lie if they're to affect true and lasting profitability and sustainable growth.

Let's say that describes you; and given that you're reading this blog at all, it probably does. Congratulations. You're in the top 1% of leaders in business today.

But there's still a good chance you're asking, "How do I build a culture of service? I get that five-star customer service is the only way to build a engine of lasting profits. And I understand that without a culture of service, that top level of service is never going to permeate my organization, and describe every encounter my customers have with my company, day after day and year after year. But how? How do we build a culture of service given the culture we have in place now?"

That, my friends, is what the next entry in the 21st-Century Business blog will explain. Stay tuned!

(And good news: while building a prosperous business is rarely easy, it is exceedingly simple.)